Imagine my non-surprise when I clicked on the latest national ranking of public school systems (this one from Forbes) and found that New Mexico ranked 51st. Read their comments below and you further grasp the scope of the problem.
So, while we are pleased that voters saw fit to rid Albuquerque Public Schools of three union-backed members (and a few other districts around the State rejected the unions), it is going to take A LOT more reform to move New Mexico schools in the right direction. Specifically, the Legislature in Santa Fe remains in thrall to the unions as does Gov. Lujan Grisham.
To really move New Mexico’s education system forward (along with the rest of the economy) it is going to take multiple electoral cycles like this one in which candidates beholden to the unions and their money are rejected in favor of reformers and choice advocates.
In Las Cruces we lost on all 6 counts. 3 school board and 3 city council. A real bummer in the drive to gain conservative values on these groups.
Thank you for your note. We would love to work with folks in Las Cruces to turn things around. I know there is a good core group there, but there hasn’t been much grassroots activity on the right.
Paul- We are working the grassroots effort to change the landscape. We have been developing over the last 3-4 months….I listed our website….
This ranking–last (or nearly last)–means two things: education does not matter and schools matters only for employment. I am told that NM has more institutions of higher learning per capita than any other state in the union.
Nominally pro-education legislators who are beholden to teachers like Bill Soules (D) want to increase salaries without demanding more of teachers. (We have all noted how much good he has done during his time in office.) Their ignorance, especially at the elementary school level, is a scandal waiting for a courageous reporter to tell the truth. And PED is an abomination of educational incompetence and bureaucratic ignorance. Its proposed revised K-12 social studies curriculum demand more of first graders than this Ph.D. can do.
Thank you, we agree with you!
Been going on for decades. We’ve always been either last or next to last, usually competing with Mississippi for worst public school ed. Every single Gov says they’ll fix it, blah blah blah.
I was not at all surprised or shocked to see the Las Cruces election results; rather, I was appalled. Again.
The local daily was an unrelenting, and now an unapologetic, causative factor in this mess. So much, in fact, the paper noted the election of union flacks (Whether members or not) to the School Board as a success for education. Abhorrent!
And again the City used the vote-ranking election process, which denies the electorate of the most important part of a runoff: finalist candidates having to establish a platform and argue it in some way. Not so with the artificiality and insult of machine politics, rampant in the present system.
As a 50+-year registered democrat, I am disgusted by the Despicables. Democrats are the furthest thing from democratic.
They abandoned the Constitution’s First Amendment long ago; and are attempting to destroy the remaining Bill of Rights.